To Love-Ru Darkness (2012) | 10 bit | BD 720p (ChiHiro)

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As the encounters between the residents of the planet Develuke — represented primarily by the female members of the royal family — and the inhabitants of Earth — represented mainly by one exasperated Yuuki Rito — continue, Rito’s hopes of a peaceful, uneventful life are set aside:

The junior princesses Nana and Momo transfer to Sainan High school on Earth to learn about Earth culture; where big sister Lala can keep an eye on them. But when the manipulative Momo decides to pursue her crush on Rito, she proposes her harem plan, pointing out that as the future inheritor of the Deviluke’s throne (once Rito marries Lala), it would be normal to have many concubines, including Momo herself (so the plan) and all the other girls Rito may fancy, including his earthen crush: Sairenji Haruna. Nothing shall stand in the way of Momo’s plan, much to Rito’s discomfort.

To complicate things the legendary assassin Yami, the Golden Darkness, is still (peacefully) keeping an eye on Rito, her target. And when Rito suddenly shows up with several possessed male high school students hot on his trail, it quickly becomes clear that some unknown party is targeting both Yami and Rito! Luckily, the trained assassin, and the powerful Momo who can communicate and control plants have no trouble protecting Rito.

But why does the mysterious assailant want Yami to return to her old ruthlessly violent self? And will Rito be able to juggle his emotions between the alien Lala and the refreshingly normal Haruna? And what of Momo’s harem plan? Troubled times lie ahead of Rito…

Episode 6 has a “bad” translation — an over localization. I noticed this way back when the series was still on TV.

There seems to be 2 main sources for translation — Pomf and Commie. When this was first aired, I preferred Commie, but was impatient and Pomf was available first. However, there are 2 lines that bothered me. The first is at about 8:45, and Pomf translated it as “This must be what they mean when they say ‘pennies from heaven’.” OK, I can accept that, it’s a fairly common English phrase.

The second was at 21:40, and translated as “It’s like those pennies came with a few pounds.” Sorry, NO. Japanese is not English, and using the British monetary system for this just breaks the mood.

When Commie came out a few days later, they translated the lines as “It’s like candy fell from the shelf right onto my lap!” and “It’s like candy that fell onto my lap together with a cake!” Even though I had never heard those phrases before, I had no problem understanding them. And if you listen to the audio, you can hear the first line start with “tana …” (shelf in Japanese), and the second line has both “tana” and “cake” (cake is a loan word from English), so even with my trivial knowledge of Japanese these seem to be fairly direct translations.

However, looking at the available BD sources, all of them either follow Pomf, or some other scripts that vary wildly from the “standards” of Pomf and Commie.

So, I added a modified subtitle track to episode 6, with the two lines replaced with Commie’s translations, and set as default subtitles. The original Pomf subtitles are still available as a 2nd subtitle track.

I briefly considered adding a complete Commie subtitle track, but they are for the TV broadcast, and have a different length from the BD releases. That would require complete re-timing, and that is beyond what I can do.